Below are set out the defining principles identified that have shaped this review's recommendations:
• Change in the construction sector will only happen through a strategic intervention that has strong leadership behind it and makes financial or wider outcome led sense for all key parties: industry itself, its clients (private and public) and government.
• Wide-scale change in the industry (beyond isolated exemplars) comes about only when clients expressly change their needs or as a result of government led regulatory or compliance issues.
• With 75% of industry's work commissioned by private clients, it is imperative that they are at the heart of the change process.
• Government also needs to play an active part in this step-change - beyond its role as a client of the industry - due to construction's political importance and its role in housing building and infrastructure. Longer-term quantifiable improvements to industry capacity and productivity need to be factored into assessment of this action plan, not just the upfront 'costs'.
• Incentives to change should leverage as many existing fiscal or policy tools as possible in a coordinated manner to make them more acceptable and practicable.
• Current government-funded demand-side stimuli for house building, measures to ease the planning system and public land supply initiatives should all better influence the construction process itself by effecting modernisation as well as targeting overall new housing numbers and specific tenures.
• Interventions need to be largely capable of cross party political support as time horizons for investment and delivery are mostly beyond a single parliamentary term. They should focus on tangible outcomes that help both the construction industry and its clients through such metrics as total housing supply, productivity, predictability or improved consumer choice.
• Transformation should focus on driving a step-change in industry investment in modernisation, underpinned by a more transparent, longer-term demand profile against which the required shape and size of evolving labour supply, its training and the adoption of new delivery technologies can be mapped and developed.